


Heart-to-Heartless

by vol_ctrl



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Armageddon, Awkward Conversations, Conversations, End of the World, Father-Son Relationship, Heart-to-Heart, Humans Prevail, Humor, On Our Own Side, Tadfield Airbase, The Ineffable Plan (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-17 23:16:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21851281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vol_ctrl/pseuds/vol_ctrl
Summary: What does Satan have to say for himself for being an absent father? Adam Young has a heart-to-heart with his supposed "Dad" with the end of the world on the line.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 24
Collections: O Lord Heal This Gift Exchange





	Heart-to-Heartless

**Author's Note:**

> This is for **Cipher** over on O Lord Heal This Server for the holiday stocking exchange! I had a lot of fun writing this ~

The air is utterly still. And then— a great wind suddenly whips across the airfield, bringing with it an oppressive heat and the stink of sulphur. 

Adam stands unmoved, moored by the shaky confidence of the strange men--who he is sure are not actually men, though he couldn’t quite explain  _ what  _ they were--who had brought him out of time and to a desert with no oasis but for the peaceful stillness, and told him to  _ do something. _

Satan is coming. Adam shakes with the roll of the tarmac, but plants his feet like the expert Grandmother’s Footsteps player he is. Only this time it’s his Father’s Footsteps. 

He’s afraid. Of course he’s afraid.

He’s afraid because everything is up to him. He’s just a kid. He’s always gotten his way, and he’s always come up with the best games. He’s realized his folly in wanting to start the world all over again. He doesn’t want all that. This is his world, from Hogback Wood to the Dip, from the Old Quarry up to the pond. But all of that will be gone if he doesn’t  _ do something. _

He’s afraid of what his father will do what with all the trouble he’s caused.

It hits him as he watches the asphalt begin to liquify and boil. As the growing pit turns to lava, and then something even hotter and more horrible, it hits him--he’s not afraid of Satan. Not really. Satan is not the father is afraid of getting in trouble with.

_ Reality will listen to you right now. _

Reality had always been Adam’s favorite plaything. With words and a sure voice, Adam could make anything real. Or unreal. With words, he could be a space pirate, and Pepper could be a warlord, Brian a pegasus, Wensleydale a witch. With words, he could turn the pond into an ocean at the end of the lane, and the Dip into a meadow of untold beauty.

_ You can change things. _

A great explosion erupts beyond Adam’s determined gaze. A hand crushes the edge of the pit, then another, and what emerges is terrible to behold. 

“Where is my son?” The voice grates like iron doors shutting, echoes with the wails of a thousand damned souls. “You?!” it cries. “You’re my rebellious son? Come here.”

Before the great Infernal King, a small, curly-haired boy steps forward.

“You’re not my dad,” Adam says plainly, just as he might have explained that the sky wasn’t actually blue, or that the floor is no longer lava. “Dads don’t wait until you’re eleven to say hello.” There is a faint quaver in his voice, no longer out of fear, but out of the most human of traits: emotion. “And then turn up to tell you off.” His lip quivers, just for a moment, as he delivers this last line.

Satan, the Great Beast, rears back. “What?”

The air is thick with the smell of fire and brimstone as the gathered parties hold their collective breath.

“Oh, my son.” There is a lightness to the voice, then. The screaming seems to fade away to a dull wail. “I did not wish for you to grow up alone.”

Adam blinks. “I didn’t grow up alone. I had a mum and a dad and all my friends.”

“Friends…” the Infernal King sneers. “Are your friends true to you? Are they loyal?”

“To the end.” Adam smiles. “They just beat  _ your  _ friends, those grown-ups you sent to replace them.”

“Replace them?” Satan considers this for a moment. “I never meant to--oh, I see. Yes. If you had done as you were supposed to, your friends would be gone.”

“I don’t want that.”

The airbase falls quiet again. Aziraphale and Crowley look to each other, exchanging a glance of confusion and determination. Crowley reaches for Aziraphale’s hand, and the angel clasps it tightly.

Satan leans forth, plants one hand and then the other on the tarmac to peer down at his tiny, human son. “You do not look like my son.”

“I’m not your son!” Adam says boldly. “My dad was always there for me--sometimes he didn’t listen, and sometimes he yelled at me, but—!”

“Did you have… a nanny growing up?” Satan narrows his Hellfire eyes at Adam.

“What?” Adam asks, incredulous. “I mean, a baby-sitter, yeah, but…”

Crowley squeezes Aziraphale’s hand, teeth clenched. “Was that part of His plan?” he mutters out of the corner of his mouth. “I thought that was part of  _ our  _ plan…”

“It was part of THE Plan,” Lucifer says, fiery eyes blazing on Crowley.

Crowley’s sunglasses jump on his nose as he shrinks back with a strangled whimper.

Aziraphale takes a step closer to Crowley and stands very, very still. Perhaps if they didn’t move, or  _ speak, you lovable idiot,  _ they could avoid the attention of the Great Beast.

“No nanny… But you have your Hellhound, yes?” Lucifer asks.

Dog peers from around Adam’s ankles, tail low between his legs.

“I’ve got Dog,” Adam offers. “Go on. Speak, Dog,” Adam encourages.

Dog speaks. It’s far from the throat-tearing bellow befitting a Hellhound, and more of a chipper yap. Dog has the presence of mind to look sheepish before the Infernal King.

Lucifer leans further from his pit and narrows lava pool eyes at the small animal. Then, he laughs. First, a singular ‘ha!’ like a clap of thunder, and then a roar of dark amusement that makes the Earth tremble. “Well, I’ll be twice-damned!” A sulphur smile creases across his lips.

“I’ve got him well trained. Only reason he’s staying by my side is ‘cause he’s well trained.”

“That-- your  _ Dog  _ was a birthday present from me, my son. I sent him to stay by your side. To protect you.” Although the Devil’s voice was horrible, like the gnashing of teeth and the hiss of magma, his tone was as warm as the distant heat blowing over them from the pit.

Adam blinked up at Satan, then looked down at Dog. His first instinct was to tell Satan that he was wrong, that Dog had  _ found  _ him--that they had found each other. But in the electric-charged miasma of reality, the precipice of the End Times, Adam felt the Truth.

“I have given you the world, my son. You are imbued with the power to end it.” Satan thought this was a pretty keen birthday present. Surely better than anything his Earthly father could have given him.

“I don’t want that,” Adam says plainly.

Satan frowns, his enormous hands clenching into fists. “It is your destiny. Your  _ purpose. _ ”

“How come parents are always telling you what to do?” Adam snaps. “If I’m supposed to… rule the world or whatever you want me to do--how come I can’t do it my way?”

“The world must be rewritten. The Great War must commence. You cannot  _ fathom  _ the great Schism, the Fall from Grace, what Heaven hath wrought upon Us, the Ones Who Dared--”

“That’s got nothing to do with me,” Adam interrupts.

Satan, the Original Adversary, the Fallen Morning Star, is struck speechless.

“If you were really my dad, you’d know that. You don’t know the first thing about me.”

“It was… not supposed to be this way,” Satan says in weak defense. “I was watching over you--what I  _ thought  _ was you. You were meant to want for nothing, I assured that.”

“You didn’t even know your own son?” Adam asks. The thought doesn’t hurt him, only bolsters his confidence that Satan is not his father. “You’re not my dad,” Adam says with a smile and shakes his head. “This is  _ my  _ world. I’m not ending it because of some silly old fight you have with your friends.”

“But this world is rotten,” Satan insists. His bulking frame grows tense, hackles rising. “You know this to be true. You have seen it.”

Adam looks around. The sky is dark above the Infernal King and his pit, crackling like molten lava, and the horizon is colored like a bruise, green fading to dreadful purple. Then, he looks behind him. Aziraphale and Crowley are there, still behind him. They are not afraid. Past them he sees Anathema and her boyfriend clutching each other. The old man and the woman in the colorful smock, too, are locked in a protective embrace. And his friends--Brian, Pepper, and Wensleydale--are there, too. His world. They’re all counting on him. They’ve always counted on him. He would never let them down. Especially not after they forgave him for being horrible, for losing sight of what was really important.

He’d made a mistake. If he hadn’t made that mistake, and if his friends hadn’t been there to tell him off, he wouldn’t have learned from it. If his friends hadn’t been his strength, his truth, he might have really ended it all. He would have been alone. The last human in this world of Heaven and Hell, of War, Famine, Pollution, and Death.

“Are your friends loyal to you?” Adam asks, same as Satan had asked him.

“What?” Satan responds.

“Your friends--are they with you ‘till the end? Will they tell you when you’re being stupid?”

“I don’t have friends,” Satan says in a deep voice. “I have warriors. Thousands upon thousands of demon who are loyal to my cause.”

“So who tells you when you’re doing something stupid?”

“No one speaks against my word!” Satan boomed.

“Well. I think your plan is stupid.”

A collective breath is held, even by the entities who need not breathe.

“ _ What did you say? _ ” Satan demands. Wind roars hot with brimstone over the airfield.

Adam squints into the buffeting, searing gusts. “I said,” he takes a breath to shout over the noise, “Your plan is STUPID!”

Satan glares down at his petulant son and the wind dies down.

“If the world starts all over, everyone’s just going to have to make the same stupid mistakes all over again. And the world isn’t for you. Or for them,” Adam was sort of unclear as to who ‘them’ were, “It’s for us. Humans. We make the stupid mistakes whether you’re around or not.”

“You’re not human, boy…” Satan growls.

“I am. Always have been. And if I’m going to make decisions for the world, I’m going to do it as a human. I don’t wanna have to go through all this… history and stuff all over again.”

Satan listens.

“The world’s not perfect, but… it’s pretty brilliant right now. There’s television, and bicycles, and somewhere in the world there’s thirty-two flavors of ice-cream.”

“There’s no way there’s that many flavors of ice cream,” Satan mutters.

“It’s true! And there’s internet, and days off school, and… There’s good stuff, even though there’s bad stuff.”

Satan lets out a deep, sulphurous breath. “I should have been a better father.”

Adam grins. “Maybe actually show up for a birthday now and then.”

“Good point,” Satan admits.

“You’re not my dad. This is my world. So you’re going to have to go now.”

The Earth shook and began to uncrumble around Satan.

“No!” he cries. “I could be a better father! In the new world!”

“Sorry,” Adam says. “One dad’s enough for a lifetime.”

The Devil roars as he is dragged back down into the pit, and the ground closes up over him.

“Almost hard to tell which was the father and which was the son,” Aziraphale murmurs into the sudden peaceful silence of a breath released.

The grumble of a car engine revs through the clearing haze left in the wake of the Devil himself. Adam recognizes the car and, for a moment, smiles in relief. Then, true fear grips him. Uh oh. He’s going to be in a  _ world  _ of trouble.

**Author's Note:**

> If you like what you see here, follow me on Twitter [@vol_ctrl](https://twitter.com/vol_ctrl) for more!


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